One of the leading figures in the mindfulness field, Elisha Goldstein PH. D is a psychologist, author and speaker, based in West Los Angeles.
His bestselling books include A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook (with Bob Stahl, foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn), Mindfulness Meditations For The Anxious Traveler and The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change The Rest Of Your Life.
His latest book is entitled Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression With Mindfulness & Self-Compassion.
His numerous other accomplishments include co-developing the popular CALM (Connecting Adolescents to Learning Mindfulness) program with his wife, psychologist Stefanie Goldstein.
Elisha was interviewed by Jon Wilde via telephone in January 2015.
EVERYDAY MINDFULNESS: According to your new book, you had your ups and downs with depression from an early age. How did you deal with that as a child?
ELISHA GOLDSTEIN: For me, like a lot of kids, the depression could be situational or it could come from something genetic. I experienced it as a lot of kids do.
My parents divorced when I was six. I was a very angry, very wilful child, oftentimes doing things like getting into fights with other kids, getting into fights with my parents, refusing to do anything that the family wanted to do. If we went out to eat I would hide under a restaurant table and refuse to eat. There was all of that going on. Later on I would look back and could see that I was really suffering emotionally as a child.
EM: Growing up, did you have any curiosity about spiritual matters?
EG: From a very young age, I would often walk outside my house in the days when kids could do that on their own. I’d take a walk down the block and become very reflective. My friends even started to call me The Reflector. I just enjoyed going off on my own and allowing myself to ponder. I guess, even at that age, I was looking for some kind of space which is what I really needed at that time.
EM: In your new book, you talk very frankly about your experiences with alcohol and drugs through your teenage years and beyond. How would you summarise that time in your life?
EG: Like many teenagers I got into drink and drugs because, at least at first, it was fun. But teenagers will do those things for all kinds of different reasons. Some will drink and take drugs to escape just as some will become addicted to cutting to numb their emotional pain. As a teenager I was very curious about the different mind states that come up. So much so that I became something of a leader in terms of trying out different drugs. I started with pot and really enjoyed it. That became a social thing, something I’d do with my friends. It became a fun thing for us to do together, something to do for kicks. It was rebellious too.
Then alcohol came into the picture. Alcohol was never my drug of choice. I drank because everybody else was doing it.
At college I discovered amphetamines and psychedelics. In my late teens and early twenties, as I was building a successful career in sales, I got into ecstasy and cocaine. Those drugs gave me a real escape. There were many points along that road when I told myself that I didn’t need to do this any more. I started to realise that it was becoming less about fun and more about pain. I continued to do it anyway.
EM: How often did alarm bells go off? How often did you resolve to get straight?
EG: There were numerous moments like that. Living in San Francisco, I frequented the city’s seedier bars. Occasionally I’d spot a mess of a man at the bar and say to my friends, “God help me if I ever turn out like him.” One night I was out partying and found myself slumped in the back of a broken-down limousine with that guy. I jumped out of the limo and decided I needed to get my life in order.
That was one example of a “aha!” moment when I realised that I was really bottoming out. It’s an awful thing to stay awake for multiple days and then try to get hold of even more drugs just to stay awake and go to work. As if people wouldn’t have noticed. I started to realise that I didn’t need to live that way. But change often doesn’t happen when someone has a kind of sudden awakening. The brain doesn’t work that way. Neural changes don’t work that way. Habits don’t usually work that way.
I went away and got some space, just like when I was a kid. In this instance I went to a retreat and started getting curious which is one of the essences of mindfulness. I got curious about my history, my spiritual life, what I believed and didn’t believe, what I intended to do with my life, how I wanted to be more present and live more meaningfully.
Around 2001, I went back into the corporate world and soon fell back into the same habits. Later on, after I became a psychologist, I came to realise that we’re not just these islands. There’s a kind of enslavement to these environmental cues around us. Our internal habits have been laid down over time. We need to understand all that to make these changes. At that time in my life, the seeds of mindfulness had been planted for me. The interest and curiosity in it had been planted.
EM: I guess it’s fair to say that most people won’t be drawn to mindfulness when their lives are going swimmingly. They’re more likely to be going through a rough time and quite likely to be experiencing some kind of crisis.
EG: That was certainly my experience and it’s been the experience of a lot of people whom I’ve dealt with professionally. They’re usually suffering pain or suffering of some kind. Right now, of course, mindfulness is enjoying some kind of mainstream attention. People who are having a pretty good time of it are coming to mindfulness, maybe thinking that it’s a cool thing to do. Some might be fairly critical of that and argue that people are missing out on the philosophy and the deep background of it. I find it a little humorous that the people who are espousing non-judgmental awareness the most are so critical of people who are coming to mindfulness more for relaxation. There are many ways of integrating mindfulness into our lives. Using mindfulness to alleviate depression and anxiety are not the only entry points.
EM: Was there are particular light-bulb moment when you realised that mindfulness was perhaps the answer to some of your problems?
EG: At the retreat centre I met someone who introduced me to mindful eating. Then I started diving into books. I was very interested in the writings of Ken Wilber at the time. I was starting to recognise that there was something else I wanted to do with my life. I realised that I wanted to help myself and help other people. That involved becoming a therapist. I managed to find a school that integrated mindfulness into its curriculum. I was now surrounding myself with people who had similar kinds of interests, people who could support me on this path.
EM: Would you have been meditating regularly at this point?
EG: I started practicing when I was accepted into the school. It was a little confusing as no-one was teaching me how to meditate. I was practicing with my peers in a haphazard kind of way.
I recognised at this time that what I really wanted to do was uncover how to make people’s lives more meaningful. I started to study the writings of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher, who had a lot to say about the sacred things of life. I started thinking about the sacred moments we have in life. I began to wonder how we can create more of those moments and how we can become more aware of them as they are happening. As I started researching that more, I got back in touch with the idea that the essence of this is teaching people to be more present in their lives.
The most scientifically researched thing out there at the time was mindfulness. After diving into Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) I met Bob Stahl who had founded a number of MBSR programs in the San Francisco Bay area and had trained a number of teachers. I took the program with him and then became teacher-trained under him. That led to us co-writing A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook which was published in 2010.
EM: What were your earliest experiences of mindfulness practice?
EG: It was so wonderful to find this very practical skill which could help me connect with how I was feeling in my body, how I was feeling emotionally, making me aware of certain mental patterns. In other words, I gained a sense of personal control. There was a sense of connection on a very deep level. I started to feel that I could handle whatever came my way.
My mum was a psychologist. During my college years I suffered from bouts of insomnia and she taught me some relaxation techniques. Those were helpful but nothing was as powerful as mindfulness. I was developing this deep understanding that, no matter what is happening, I can step back into this space where I don’t need to take the bait of my mind. I can simply be with what is happening. Understanding that I had a choice was a big thing.
As I was starting to become a therapist in 2005, I started integrating mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques for anxiety and depression. Then I found out that there was a program called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). In a way I’d already been teaching that. After connecting with Zindel Siegel, a cognitive therapist, I trained in MBCT and, around 2010, brought the first program to Los Angeles.
EM: It seems that many people, when they begin to practice mindfulness, get caught up in questions like “Am I doing this correctly?” or mindfulness becomes another form of striving for them. Did you encounter those obstacles in your own practice?
EG: I still encounter a lot of obstacles on my mindful path. Certainly the striving was a big one for me. In our western culture, there’s a tendency to look at mindfulness programs like MBSR and MBCT as ways of helping ourselves. The paradox is that, whatever our initial goals are, we have to let those go. We almost have to do it for the sake of it, for learning itself.
In my own practice, there were certainly times when I felt disappointed with my meditation. There would be days when I’d think, “It wasn’t as good as yesterday’s session.”
Ken Wilber has this wonderful idea of “transcend and include”. That’s really what I’ve learned to do. When I notice that striving there, that need to get to a certain place, I’ve learned to get better at recognising that and including that as part of my experience.
In my book The Now Effect I have a chapter called It’s Like This…And This Too. I talk about the uncertainty, confusion, boredom and frustration that all have the effect of taking us away from our intentions. By realising that this too is what is here right now, we come back to the present moment. Mindfulness is all about being intimate with and aware of what is here with a sense of living curiosity. So it’s like this…and this too. So I continue to include and include and include.
Of course, it’s one thing to cognitively hear that and another thing to put that into practice. So we train our brains to recognise it more automatically, catching these thoughts and feelings as they arise. With practice, we catch those thoughts and feelings without even being conscious we’re doing so. It’s like when you fall off balance and your body naturally corrects itself. You don’t think about it. You just do it. As I practice mindfulness, I wake up to what’s happening a little sooner and ask myself how I can pay attention to that.
EM: The mind loves to judge, doesn’t it?
EG: It’s natural for our minds to judge. In my new book and in The Now Effect, I quote Victor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist/psychiatrist who chronicled his experiences as a concentration camp inmate in the book Man’s Search For Meaning. One thing Frankl said was, “In between stimulus and response, there is a space; in that space lies our power to choose our response – there lies freedom.”
In essence, the practice is to notice when the judging is happening so we can recognise the space in between what we’re judging (the stimulus) and the judging itself (the reaction) and choose to make a change. The power to choose our responses comes with an awareness of that space.
Frankl’s awareness of that came in the midst of the most horrendous trauma.
EM: In the new book you talk about the idea of natural antidepressants. Could you explain a little about that?
EG: Medications are one kind of antidepressant. But they’re not the only kind. In the book I explain how science is now showing that we also have natural antidepressants within our brains. I gather them into five main categories: mindfulness, self-compassion, purpose, play and mastery. Step by step, the book shows how we can strengthen our brain’s ability to act as its own antidepressant which can be even more effective than any medication you might be prescribed.
In the book I talk about the way that the alchemy of self-compassion and mindfulness transforms vulnerability so it becomes an upward spiral of self-worth and resiliency. Mindfulness is maybe a starting point. Implicit in mindfulness is the experience of self-compassion and compassion for others. Research has shown that people who suffer from anxiety and depression often have low traits of self-compassion. So maybe it’s not enough to wait for self-compassion to arrive by practicing mindfulness. It might be necessary to scaffold a little bit, for people to explore explicit self-compassion practices to help bolster that within them. That inevitably becomes a natural antidepressant.
The research around compassion shows that it creates neural shifts to parts of the brain, particularly the left pre-frontal cortex, associated with positive emotions and also resiliency. Both mindfulness and compassion create that left neural shift.
EM: Given that the spectrum of depressive disorders is so wide, was there a particular challenge in writing a book about mindfulness and depression?
EG: When I’m working with someone who has suffered long-term depression, I have to meet them where they are at. When I write a book about depression, it’s laid out in a particular way and people are going to read it the same way no matter where they are at. For some people who are depressed, mindfulness may not be a good starting point.
That’s one main reason why I don’t start the book with mindfulness. Instead I start by talking about understanding the depression loop. Even if someone is depressed, they might be able to recognise there are these different things they are stuck in. I lead into discussing mindfulness almost informally. The reader is asked whether they can recognise different thoughts, emotions, sensations and behaviour patterns that are associated with their experience of being depressed or anxious. That gives people the opportunity to step outside of the depressive loop they might be in. Within that, maybe there’s a chance of getting some perspective on what’s going on. Or maybe it’s an invitation to get into mindfulness.
EM: In your work as a psychologist, how difficult is it to gauge whether mindfulness will be the right practice for someone suffering a depressive episode?
EG: If someone is deeply depressed and they have no background in mindfulness or meditation, I would not make mindfulness or meditation their first point of contact. They might be so identified with their self-critical thoughts that even giving them something to do would be to give them something else to fail at.
In terms of the natural antidepressants that I talk about, some people may find that uncovering play in their lives and being able to engage with it is more of a natural entry point for them than mindfulness. So it’s not necessarily that starting a mindfulness practice is for everyone who has suffered depression. They might come to mindfulness but different entry points will be better for different people.
EM: As adults, of course, it’s all too easy for us to lose a sense of play.
EG: Definitely, and it’s a great thing to rediscover that sense of creativity and engagement without there being any judgment involved. Some people might find it challenging to reconnect to that sense of play. One of the exercises I suggest in the book is to reach back into your childhood and remind yourself of what play was like then. The purpose of that practice is to start feeling the juices that flow when you remember what play was like as a kid. Then the opportunity arises to imagine what play, one of the most powerful natural antidepressants, might be like as an adult.
EM: What are your preferred methods of play?
EG: I have a couple of young children so I play quite a bit with them. I quite literally become a kid with them, whether we’re playing basketball or shooting darts. I play guitar, usually folky type stuff. I’m not terribly good on guitar but I’ve started bringing some mindfulness to it. That helps me with the sense of wanting to give up so easily when I find myself getting frustrated or self-critical. I’ll watch funny clips on YouTube. Or I’ll watch TV. There’s a backlash against television at the moment. There’s a difference between aimlessly flipping through the channels and being engaged with a show that you follow regularly.
It’s really about opening up what play means for you. It’s about opening up to your own creative space.
EM: We live in a time when many people’s everyday lives are dominated by hand-held gadgets. How does that square with living a mindful life?
EG: I certainly feel over-connected to my phone and its various apps. I’m aware that these things stress my nervous system. I simply try to bring a little mindfulness to it. I notice the feelings that are associated with the urge or compulsion to be connected to my phone. It fascinates me how compelled I can be to check the phone regularly, how enslaved I can be to this device. It makes me reflect on the times when I didn’t want to do drugs any more but I kept falling into that behaviour. There’s a kind of neural enslavement happening when it comes to our habits and it’s easy to get into an addictive cycle with technology. With smart phones, we get to the point where having space to ourselves is uncomfortable. Every time we’re alone or waiting, we’ve got infinite opportunities for distraction within this little hand-held box. All this has happened far quicker than we’ve been able to catch up with, far quicker than we’ve been able to adaptively relate to. The thing we’re not paying attention to is how it stresses our nervous systems and how it trains that continuous partial attention, that sense of distraction or multi-tasking as a habit.
EM: The clinical psychologist Christopher Germer makes the point that the internet has made the world so much smaller and, as a result, our exposure to human suffering has grown exponentially. Would it then follow that we run the risk of compassion fatigue?
EG: I see these bumper stickers that read, “If you’re not depressed, you’re not paying attention.” That’s where the power of mindfulness really comes into play. It trains us in equanimity and balance. We can learn to ignite the compassionate heart which is important in terms of feeling connected.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the suffering in the world to the point where you don’t know what to do with it. Then you become depressed. So we can learn to step back. As in the serenity prayer, to gain the serenity to accept the things we cannot change and to recognise the difference between what we can change and what we can’t. That’s what equanimity is. With that equanimity, we may be able to accept that suffering in our lives with compassion whilst reminding ourselves that we can get burned out by compassion. That’s when self-compassion comes into play.
EM: In addition to running MBSR and MBCT programs, you also train therapists, physicians, educators and business people. When working with big businesses, is there an issue for you about whether those businesses are motivated more by the idea of increasing profitability than improving the wellbeing of their workforce?
EG: That question does arise but, frankly, I don’t care. If a business is interested in bringing its employees to mindfulness, I’m not interested in what the company’s motivation is. I care more about what the teacher is going to be like. If someone is calling me in and they’re telling me that they’re interested in reducing their healthcare costs and making their company more productive, that’s fine. I’ll still be teaching in my own way. What the company expects to get out of it, those are just side effects as far as I’m concerned. I’ll still be teaching people how to be more present in their lives, how to be more caringly aware and all the rest of it.
EM: With your wife Stephanie you also run an eight-week program called Connecting Adolescents To Learning Mindfulness (CALM). How does teaching adolescents differ from teaching adults?
EG: That program is based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR program but integrating more social and emotional learning skills which aren’t necessarily a part of MBSR. Some teenagers who join the program aren’t really interested in being there. Their parents have told them to be there. With adults it’s usually a self-selected group and they want to be there.
I always think of it in terms of planting seeds. An adult might join a program because he’s heard that mindfulness will help him focus and he thinks it might make him more successful in his job. That’s the doorway for them. As the weeks go by their perspective might well change and they’ll begin to see that there’s more to it than they imagined. A seed has been planted which may well bear fruit for them in two months, two years, whatever. I’m just happy to see them walk through the door in the first place. Those seeds are planted in a similar way for the adolescents who join the CALM program.
EM: How would you say mindfulness has changed your life?
EG: It might even have saved my life. It’s an endless adventure for me. There’s so much beautiful fruit to be found in mindfulness. Implicit within it is the sense of compassion and self-compassion. There are times when we need to make the compassion and self-compassion more explicit. Mindfulness has helped me become far more curious about myself. It has helped me in my own emotional struggles. It helps me in my parenting and my relationship with my wife. It helps me in my work with people and with my writing. Ultimately, it’s made me far more caring towards myself and other people. Nobody could possibly put a price-tag on all that.
EM: Finally, if you could go back in time and meet the younger version of yourself who hit rock bottom in that limousine, what would you say to him?
EG: I’d feel enormous compassion towards that person and to the troubled younger child. I’d also hope to feel a strong sense of integration with those younger versions of myself within my heart. Just thinking about that makes me feel a kind of happiness that is genuinely deep and meaningful, a happiness that is unshakeable rather than fleeting. It’s a happiness that goes to the very core. Each one of has the ability to uncover and connect with that form of happiness. Mindfulness can be key to that process of learning about ourselves.
Elisha’s new book (Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression With Mindfulness & Self-Compassion) is out now, published by Simon & Schuster, you can find it here.
Elisha’s website can be found here: http://elishagoldstein.com
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